First look: Pandora 4.0, the new mobile frontier

Pandora 4.0 brings a new experience to smartphone, tablet users.

Here comes Pandora 4.0, a big remake of the music service's mobile listening environment. If you are a Pandora fan, get ready for expanded playlist, station-making, lyric-reading, personal profile, and social networking power on your smartphone. The new service creates a "unifying" experience across web and mobile devices, the company proclaims. It also represents about six or seven years of planning, thinking, and development for the outfit.

Back in 2005, iPhone and Android mobile gadgets were gleams in the eye of Apple and Google. Pandora, however, was transforming radio and music distribution with its sophisticated "genome" powered song recommendation algorithm. Millions of users were clicking thumbs up or down to millions of tunes on, well, millions of Pandora channels. By 2007, Pandora was a huge hit.

It was, however, mostly a desktop computer hit. "We started thinking about creating a mobile service in 2004," Pandora CTO Tom Conrad told us in an interview. "We wanted to unify the Pandora experience." That meant an experience that was easy from the start, that allowed users to individualize their environment and get more of what they wanted, and that was "ubiquitously available."

"But the technical environment of 2005 did not let us do the ubiquity thing," Conrad explained. Then came the Apple App Store in 2008, and Pandora found itself one of the top five most downloaded mobile applications. Over the next four years 75 percent of Pandora listening shifted to smartphones. The company says that over 115 million registered users have tuned into the service on a smart mobile. The platform represents around 55 percent of its advertising revenue.

All this has put more and more pressure on the company to rewrite its mobile interface. Up until now, the mobile experience "has functionally been catching up to the web," Conrad observed.

That was then, Pandora hopes. Here's what Android and iPhone Pandora lovers will get now (and Windows Phone 8 users will get in early 2013).

Curators and mentors

The new Pandora mobile experience starts with an elaborate profile page that chronicles your activity, your stations, your likes, users you are following, and your fans. Users can make it public or private or share it on Facebook and Twitter. It will narrate the channels you created, the songs you shared, the tunes you liked, and allow you to follow the activities of your friends.

"We are trying to create an environment in which you can be very selective about who you want to follow," Conrad told us, giving users the option of collaborating with other users as mentors or music curators.

Pandora 4.0 will also offer mobile subscribers more access to music information: song lyrics, artist profiles, and even lists of Genome attributes. The screenshot below, for example, exhibits Genome qualities for "Ads for Feelings" by Michael Zapruder. These include "a busy horn section" and "a prominent flute part." Bottom line: the mobile user gets clued into how the track became part of her queue. Channel making and channel shuffling capacities have been expanded. And the search software has been improved.

"Searches are smarter now," Conrad explained. "'Pop' will get you today's hits; 'Adele' will get you Adele."

Rivals and rates

Pandora 4.0 for iOS smartphones goes live for download in the App Store at 5 pm EDT on Monday, 29 October. The Android version is going to take a little longer to show up in Google Play—"in the coming weeks," we were told. The upgrades arrive as the smartphone radio field is diversifying and expanding. Pandora still has a huge profile, but is hardly the only kid on the block. Spotify, Rdio, Last.fm, Turntable.fm all have big followings in the United States. Even Apple has been making noises about setting up a Pandora rival for the iPhone and iPad.

I asked Conrad about the Apple possibility. He didn't dismiss the prospect as insignificant, but he didn't seem too worried, either.

"When we launched in 2005, AOL and Microsoft were the largest services; MySpace was the gorilla in the room," Conrad noted. "Clear Channel was getting serious about iHeartRadio. What has allowed us to succeed despite stiff competition is that we are dedicated to the future of radio. We have a simple, elegant product to which we are devoted, and which we think we can produce better than anybody else."

Aside from its scale, Pandora also stands out because of its high-profile advocacy of Internet performance royalty reform. Pandora founder Tim Westergren is outspoken in his support of the Internet Radio Fairness Act, now making its way through the House and Senate. Pandora says about half of its revenues go to performance royalties. The proposed legislation in both its Senate and House forms would put rates on a par with those paid by satellite and cable-based radio services.

Pandora listeners are likely to support the initiative without too much cajoling. The big challenge will be getting artists and musicians to at least sympathize with the idea.

In a recent blog post, Westergren disclosed the rates paid to various artists featured on the service. Two thousand will receive over $10,000 each over the next 12 months. "And for more than 800 we'll pay over $50,000, more than the income of the average American household," he added. But these payouts come at the expense of Pandora's expansion.

"Making performance fees fair for internet radio will drive massive investment in the space, accelerating the growth of the overall sector," Westergren concluded. "The short-term reduction in revenue would be rapidly swamped by the overall growth of the sector. Imagine the impact on artists if this industry grew to become 25 percent or even 50 percent of radio listening."

Trying to get musicians to sympathize with lower royalties is going to be a tough sell. The new expanded artist profiles on Pandora 4.0 might help generate some good will. Then again, count on plenty of opposition from the labels, and from performance royalty distributor SoundExchange.

"It's our hope that Internet radio platforms like Pandora continue to thrive," the non-profit declared in a response statement. "But the company can't cut costs at the expense of musicians. It's simply unfair."

Promoted Comments

Artists should love Pandora. It has connected me to artists and entire genres of music I never would have discovered with traditional radio.

It's not just about increasing usage by 25% or 50%. Pandora is a more effective distributor of music than traditional channels. Radio stations bombard me with popular songs. I hear the same songs on the radio over and over and over again. No need to buy them! The artist and producers can spend millions of dollars on advertising and preferred placement to try to get their product in front of me, but it backfires due to oversaturation.

Pandora, on the other hand, is nearly a perfect salesman. It guides me to music I like that I have not heard on the radio. Then, it yanks it out from under my feet and won't play it on demand. I can listen more and hope to hear that song again, or I can just go buy it.

I ditched pandora for spotify. I would go back to pandora if they let me "request a song" on that station or moved to a spotify model of pay and you can listen to anything. Pandora has to update their business model. They are the best at making custom radio stations but it isn't enough to make up for the restriction when spotify and rapsody allow you to listen to whatever and as much as you want.

Hrm... I only got a minor bug update on iOS 5.1.1. Does Pandora 4.x require iOS 6 maybe? Only Pandora 3.2.1 available here - I don't see 4 in the AppStore either at 5:14pm EDT.

I am guessing they meant to push out 4.0 and the 3.2.1 update is a mistake.

Otherwise, I like Pandora. It's a clean cut service which even with the commercials is a high quality product and works as one expects it to. I can now afford the $36 / year (no-commercials and the fact that I am supporting something I like is nice) and I get something that has truly unlimited listening (yes yes I know .. after 10 or so skips an hour, you can't skip for a while on that particular station .. not a big deal for me).

I ditched Pandora for Spotify a while a go. Although I think Pandora has the best streaming radio option between the two, I prefer the ability to create my own playlists from the songs I want in Spotify. Though I'm really liking Songza for the curated radio stations and diversity of artists available. With those two combined I'm seeing less and less of a need for Pandora.

Hrm... I only got a minor bug update on iOS 5.1.1. Does Pandora 4.x require iOS 6 maybe? Only Pandora 3.2.1 available here - I don't see 4 in the AppStore either at 5:14pm EDT.

I am guessing they meant to push out 4.0 and the 3.2.1 update is a mistake.

Otherwise, I like Pandora. It's a clean cut service which even with the commercials is a high quality product and works as one expects it to. I can now afford the $36 / year (no-commercials and the fact that I am supporting something I like is nice) and I get something that has truly unlimited listening (yes yes I know .. after 10 or so skips an hour, you can't skip for a while on that particular station .. not a big deal for me).

Eh, it's been rather awful lately. Out of five media events (we'll call them) on my way home a few days ago, 3 were ads - two of which were bandwidth consuming video ads, and only 2 songs. My interest in Pandora 4.0 is that this has been alleviated - otherwise I'm just going to stick with Spotify and my own music unfortunately.

I'm not comfortable telling a company I approve of their actions by subscribing to their services :-/

Artists should love Pandora. It has connected me to artists and entire genres of music I never would have discovered with traditional radio.

It's not just about increasing usage by 25% or 50%. Pandora is a more effective distributor of music than traditional channels. Radio stations bombard me with popular songs. I hear the same songs on the radio over and over and over again. No need to buy them! The artist and producers can spend millions of dollars on advertising and preferred placement to try to get their product in front of me, but it backfires due to oversaturation.

Pandora, on the other hand, is nearly a perfect salesman. It guides me to music I like that I have not heard on the radio. Then, it yanks it out from under my feet and won't play it on demand. I can listen more and hope to hear that song again, or I can just go buy it.

For the record, you could already see song lyrics, artist pages, and track features in Pandora 3 for iPhone. The only other possible upgrades I care about are the 'channel creating and shiffling' improvements, but that is vague enough that it could mean absolutely nothing. And I care not about the user profile/social stuff.

I'm not comfortable telling a company I approve of their actions by subscribing to their services :-/

I'm confused by this. You're saying that you're not comfortable with a software service trying to meet their bottom line by delivering ads when you as a consumer could simply pay for the service to remove those ads?

It's not like Pandora's actually making money. They've been in the red since they started operating. In talking with Tim Westergren directly, they make considerably more money from the paid service than they do from advertisement click-throughs. Is a service supposed to offer you free access, devoid of frequent advertisements which area already not frequent enough to support their business model, on the principle that you deserve fewer advertisements for using the service, thus costing them more money? I don't see how paying for the subscription service -- which eliminates ads -- is "approving" of their advertising model.

Pandora is about as close to the flat-fee access model as we're going to get in the immediate future to unrestricted music access. You might not get to choose your songs directly, but the fee is reasonable for a licensing service when offered in conjunction with a pay-to-own model that has settled on reasonable rates. I personally believe I have an ethical obligation to support a good entrepreneurial idea in the Music Genome Project along with a business model that tells the publishers, "I support reasonable, uncapped internet streaming of music."

This is made out to sound like a lot in the article, but it actually seems more than reasonable to me for a business entirely built upon playing music to spend half of their revenue paying for that music.

You could argue about how much (or little) of that money is actually going to the artist instead of the label, but that is irrelevant to the overall royalty cost.

This is made out to sound like a lot in the article, but it actually seems more than reasonable to me for a business entirely built upon playing music to spend half of their revenue paying for that music.

You could argue about how much (or little) of that money is actually going to the artist instead of the label, but that is irrelevant to the overall royalty cost.

Yeah, I'd be interested to see a more complete breakdown of their expenses. Obviously there's going to be some infrastructure expense (delivering that music) and other overhead and labor expenses. But the idea that half their revenue goes to actually procuring the product they intend to sell to the end customer? That doesn't seem too ridiculous.

On the other hand, I have no idea how that compares to other businesses (specifically those that are reselling a product).

I'm not comfortable telling a company I approve of their actions by subscribing to their services :-/

I'm confused by this. You're saying that you're not comfortable with a software service trying to meet their bottom line by delivering ads when you as a consumer could simply pay for the service to remove those ads?

It's not like Pandora's actually making money. They've been in the red since they started operating. In talking with Tim Westergren directly, they make considerably more money from the paid service than they do from advertisement click-throughs. Is a service supposed to offer you free access, devoid of frequent advertisements which area already not frequent enough to support their business model, on the principle that you deserve fewer advertisements for using the service, thus costing them more money? I don't see how paying for the subscription service -- which eliminates ads -- is "approving" of their advertising model.

Pandora is about as close to the flat-fee access model as we're going to get in the immediate future to unrestricted music access. You might not get to choose your songs directly, but the fee is reasonable for a licensing service when offered in conjunction with a pay-to-own model that has settled on reasonable rates. I personally believe I have an ethical obligation to support a good entrepreneurial idea in the Music Genome Project along with a business model that tells the publishers, "I support reasonable, uncapped internet streaming of music."

Where did I lose you at? You're confused, but you feel I should (to sum up) "quit my bitchin'", it seems like. Standard radio seems to be around 70/30 for music to ads. Pandora used to be (or felt like) 40-50% audio ads - which I was absolutely fine with. The last several times I've used Pandora though, it's been the other way around from standard broadcast radio - closer to 30% music and 70% audio/video ads. The world is going toward bandwidth limited plans - and the amount of ads (particularly the heavy video ones) seems like a horrible approach at monetizing. This is where it feels like I'm being extorted - they have to play /some/ music, otherwise there's absolutely no way I'd stick around, but if I'm not going to pay for their service, they're going to make me pay for it out of my limited bandwidth cache by playing heavy video ads - TAKE THAT YOU LEECH!

I'm just not ok with endorsing a company for such a tactic.

There are several other models. For instance, I regularly support fine institutions like Soma FM - and they don't even /have/ ads.

Don't get me wrong, I particularly enjoyed (in the past) Pandora's unique ability to introduce me to new music that I did in fact like. But they're putting me in a very awkward position by using this tactic now. I'm actually a bit irritated that I purchased a Pandora One sub for a friend of mine as a birthday gift at this point - it's like a double slap to the face. ::shrug::

I got sick of the ads and subbed to Pandora One. I love it, and I think the cost is totally worth it. I work in a data center and have the luxury of walking around with headphones during my entire shift if I want. Pandora makes my day so much better.

That said, I also like Google Play streaming. My entire collection is up there so I switch between the two.

Yeah, I'd be interested to see a more complete breakdown of their expenses. Obviously there's going to be some infrastructure expense (delivering that music) and other overhead and labor expenses. But the idea that half their revenue goes to actually procuring the product they intend to sell to the end customer? That doesn't seem too ridiculous.

On the other hand, I have no idea how that compares to other businesses (specifically those that are reselling a product).

Additionally, Pandora's original complaint was not that they are necessarily paying roughly half of their expenses to the publishers. Rather, originally Pandora was paying to SoundExchange double the rates that terrestrial and satellite radio stations were having to pay, simply because they were doing it "on the Internet." That dispute I believe has since been settled, although I do not know how the rates for Internet radio compare today to terrestrial and satellite.

The Internet Radio Fairness Act is not looking to stiff artists or publishers. It's asking for a leveling of royalty rates so that Internet streamers pay according to the same rate structure as satellite radio. Notice, that the requested standard isn't even so "crazy" as a most-favored-nation arrangement, which I personally would think to be the most fair. Right now, streamers pay on a "willing buyer, willing seller" model, which is a laconic description for, "We will sell it for you at the highest possible price you can afford to buy it because we have superior market leverage as a monopoly supplier." Pandora et al want the same federal panel that controls terrestrial radio licensing to cover Internet radio licensing as well, so that the terms under which both are negotiated are equal.

Big Radio believes that Pandora can solve its revenue problem by licensing more ads -- an amusing thought to entertain given the vitriol already demonstrated about Pandora's advertisements. Much of Pandora's expenses goes into hiring the personnel necessary to categorize a song according to the Music Genome Project. Every one of those "hundreds of other similarities" that causes one song to play after another was flagged by human ears and human mouse-clicks. Either Pandora cuts into its personnel training, or it petitions for a reduction of royalty fees.

I'm not necessarily advocating government intervention and regulation or short-changing the starving artists, but Pandora does appear to have a point that the licensing rates should have a modicum of fairness. After all, for all of us who decry that doing something "on the Internet" isn't novel, why should the rates be fundamentally different for radio that happens to be "on the Internet?"

Edit in re: to FoO

FoO wrote:

Where did I lose you at? You're confused, but you feel I should (to sum up) "quit my bitchin'", it seems like. Standard radio seems to be around 70/30 for music to ads. Pandora used to be (or felt like) 40-50% audio ads - which I was absolutely fine with. The last several times I've used Pandora though, it's been the other way around from standard broadcast radio - closer to 30% music and 70% audio/video ads.The world is going toward bandwidth limited plans - and the amount of ads (particularly the heavy video ones) seems like a horrible approach at monetizing. This is where it feels like I'm being extorted - they have to play /some/ music, otherwise there's absolutely no way I'd stick around, but if I'm not going to pay for their service, they're going to make me pay for it out of my limited bandwidth cache by playing heavy video ads - TAKE THAT YOU LEECH!

Terrestrial radio where I'm at is closer to a 40/60 ad/content ratio, where content includes DJ commentary and sponsorships -- not just music. The fact that Pandora is slipping closer to this standard is to be expected when they are paying significantly higher royalty rates for their business model than terrestrial radio. I don't think it's logical to "punish" them for playing commensurate advertising time by not purchasing the license that they want you to buy in the first place that eliminates the advertisements.

Or do you think Pandora should invert the service and make their default service $36 a year with an option to opt out and pay for advertisements? My confusion lies in where you think Pandora should be making their money. You're angry that they are playing too many ads to subsidize their service, and you won't support them with a flat fee that eliminates the ads. You're arguing the royalty rates should be cheaper? In which case, why don't you support Pandora, which is trying to pass cheaper royalties that would likely reduce the number of ads being played to a generically acceptable level? Or should Pandora change the way in which they structure their business and reduce costs somehow?

Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with the sentiment that 1) there are too many ads on the standard service, and 2) too many ads unfairly eats through bandwidth caps. I'm just suggesting you might be shooting the messenger, here. If the publishers are charging Pandora higher fees than terrestrial radio, they're going to have to pass on the costs. So you either pay for it in ads or in subscription fees. But saying you're going to stick it to Pandora, in so many words, by forcing them to do exactly the thing that you hate them doing is extremely circuitous and counterproductive.

With all the attention Pandora gets it always amazes me that they still continue to offer a completely cramped interface for desktops. And still love to repeat songs they've played over and over again until you say "I'm tired of this" on every one. There should be a way to get more variety! Work on the fundamentals, guys.

With all the attention Pandora gets it always amazes me that they still continue to offer a completely cramped interface for desktops. And still love to repeat songs they've played over and over again until you say "I'm tired of this" on every one. There should be a way to get more variety! Work on the fundamentals, guys.

Try thumbing up more. Thumbing up increases the diversity of a station by adding that song's flags to the playlist. Thumbing down subtracts flags. Usually my friends who complain that Pandora put Taylor Swift on their Beatles station thumbed up every track until they diversified their way into everything upbeat and common time.

It needs seamless facebook integration - sharing what you're listening to as you're listening to it to facebook. The way spotify does. Or at least automatically share to facebook when you like a song. They still think they're in the social network game when really they're in the custom-radio game.

Since they're not a niche product they need to give up the "music social network" ambitions. There's 1 social network; it's winner take all. And it's facebook. They should be leveraging the open graph to the hilt.

At their Big Deal in SF today, Microsoft also announced Pandora for Windows Phone 8.

Edit: with one free year of Pandora service, without ads.

Only for Windows Phone 8...how staggeringly inefficient is their app that it REQUIRES native code, or multithreading, or Krait CPUs, or whatever is keeping it from WP7.5? I guess I'll be sticking to Nokia Music until I decide on my next phone - which, I'll note, is also ad-free, and supports offline listening.

My main frustration with Pandora is how they have social-ified your history. It's all about "updates" now, in chronological order. And you have to click Show More every five entries.

The way I want to discover music is not merely to hear one song I like, but to look back and see the pattern. Discover that I liked many of a given artist's songs. Then I might look into buying their whole album and discover the rest of their work, too. If I just got that one song, I wouldn't find the rest.

So I just want a list... everything I liked/bookmarked, sorted by artist/album. They can put a nice convenient link to Amazon right there so I can go and buy it, I don't mind. But doing this now is agonizing.

My main frustration with Pandora is how they have social-ified your history. It's all about "updates" now, in chronological order. And you have to click Show More every five entries.

The way I want to discover music is not merely to hear one song I like, but to look back and see the pattern. Discover that I liked many of a given artist's songs. Then I might look into buying their whole album and discover the rest of their work, too. If I just got that one song, I wouldn't find the rest.

So I just want a list... everything I liked/bookmarked, sorted by artist/album. They can put a nice convenient link to Amazon right there so I can go and buy it, I don't mind. But doing this now is agonizing.

the interface itself tells the story. I saw the update a while back on my Android phone. It went something like "Oh, hey, they changed the interface to look more like Facebook. I guess I'll have to remove it now..."

I ditched pandora for spotify. I would go back to pandora if they let me "request a song" on that station or moved to a spotify model of pay and you can listen to anything. Pandora has to update their business model. They are the best at making custom radio stations but it isn't enough to make up for the restriction when spotify and rapsody allow you to listen to whatever and as much as you want.

I use Pandora exhaustively, and love it. I got tired of the ads and spent $36 to upgrade to One, and now I love it even more. If they can even the playing field between internet radio and traditional broadcast mediums, in terms of royalties, in the long term it would probably lower the amount of ads needed to support the service for non subscribers.

I'm looking forward to a native Windows 8 app, now that I've been separated from my Pandora gadget. The desktop app is an improvement over the previous, but it's still not as good as the gadget was (even if the gadget had a massive memory leak.)

I'm confused - didn't this used to be called 'radio'? Plus, users didn't have to pay $50/mo for data connections and could get a signal just about anywhere.

The majority of my stations have music that never appears on my local radio stations. Since the majority are Clear Channel I can't expect variety or change. Maybe a few markets in the country still have more than 1 or two non-clear channel stations, but I'm not sure these days. Out of our non-clear channel stations, all but one are talk radio.

Where did I lose you at? You're confused, but you feel I should (to sum up) "quit my bitchin'", it seems like. Standard radio seems to be around 70/30 for music to ads. Pandora used to be (or felt like) 40-50% audio ads - which I was absolutely fine with. The last several times I've used Pandora though, it's been the other way around from standard broadcast radio - closer to 30% music and 70% audio/video ads.

Where are you getting these numbers?

I don't believe you actually use Pandora, or if you do, you're exaggerating in the extreme to support your position (to what purpose I have no idea).

The ads don't really annoy me, Pandora is rarely running as a foreground app, and the ads are brief and infrequent. Terrestrial radio is horrible, some 5+ minutes of ads for every 10 minutes of audio, if I'm lucky. They do a "top 5 at 5" every weekday here, and #1 doesn't air until closer to 5:45. Less than 7 songs an hour. The only reason i listen to terresdtrial radio at all anymore is for those quick jumps across town. Aything more than 10 minutes, and Pandora is on. Back in NY we used to be guaranteed 95% music on some of the stations, some even "less than 1 minute of commercials per hour", but here, it;s about 1 song, 4 comemrcials, then maybe 2 songs before the DL talks (ads), and then 5-7 more commercials. 90% of the music we do hear is from the same 20 or 30 tracks, with little or no variety, and al lthat super popular no-talent crap. yesterday, ony our Adults hard Rock Alternative station they played a Reggea song followed by a rap track (and then I cut pandora on, would have sooner but I was on a call at the time).

Checking Soundhound now, in 3 months, all my listening to radio, I've tagged only 2 tracks I liked for later purchase. I've bought more than 30 tracks I found on Pandora in that same time, including from more than a dozen artists i can;t even get the local hard rock stations to play on request. The day Pandora is built into my dash so i don;t have to dock and cut on my phone is the last day I listen to terestrial radio in the car.

Where did I lose you at? You're confused, but you feel I should (to sum up) "quit my bitchin'", it seems like. Standard radio seems to be around 70/30 for music to ads. Pandora used to be (or felt like) 40-50% audio ads - which I was absolutely fine with. The last several times I've used Pandora though, it's been the other way around from standard broadcast radio - closer to 30% music and 70% audio/video ads. The world is going toward bandwidth limited plans - and the amount of ads (particularly the heavy video ones) seems like a horrible approach at monetizing. This is where it feels like I'm being extorted - they have to play /some/ music, otherwise there's absolutely no way I'd stick around, but if I'm not going to pay for their service, they're going to make me pay for it out of my limited bandwidth cache by playing heavy video ads - TAKE THAT YOU LEECH!

I'm just not ok with endorsing a company for such a tactic.

There are several other models. For instance, I regularly support fine institutions like Soma FM - and they don't even /have/ ads.

Don't get me wrong, I particularly enjoyed (in the past) Pandora's unique ability to introduce me to new music that I did in fact like. But they're putting me in a very awkward position by using this tactic now. I'm actually a bit irritated that I purchased a Pandora One sub for a friend of mine as a birthday gift at this point - it's like a double slap to the face. ::shrug::

The reason you're seeing such an increase in advertisements, as indicated by Warhawke, is that they don't make much money off the ads. Pandora didn't always used to have to pay the royalty rates they do today. What you're seeing is the result of increased financial pressure on the company. The whole point of the Internet Radio Fairness Act is to fix the inflated royalty rates that Pandora has to pay over terrestrial radio broadcasters, which would help alleviate some of the strain.

If you're really that concerned about the bandwidth consumed by the advertisements, why don't you try a little math exercise. I'm going to use some data I found at Metaflood (35.84 MB/hour for Pandora) as well as some assumptions (a reasonable estimate of 50% ads), as well as an approximate $/MB metered rate based upon Verizon's 4GB Share Everything plan ($70/4096 MB = $0.017 / MB, we'll round up to $0.02).

Pandora One, which gets rid of the ads you find so offensive, costs $36/year. If you listen to Pandora for more than 10 hours in a year, you have just paid for Pandora One in terms of the amount of extra bandwidth consumed by the ads.

I'm sure my math is not perfect and the numbers can be adjusted any way you like them. But if you're like me, it would require *a lot* of fiddling before you could make the cost of the Pandora One subscription sound like a losing prospect.

Matthew Lasar / Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.